witesoxfan

QUOTE (ChrisLikesBaseball @ Feb 26, 2011 -> 08:50 AM) I woke up this morning and realized I had drunk Facebook-messaged a couple of people.. Humorous and dangerous to say the least. This did prompt me to go back through previous messages I had sent, in similar states of mind and I am extremely pleased with how many of them led to positive situations. Hmmmm

Good, I wouldn't mind being wrong about Mauer's knees. Hopefully are a problem all year and he can only DH.

Really wasn't too bad. Ozzie is still awesome.

Flame me if I'm wrong here, I don't care, but all I could think about when I was watching the game tonight was the early 00s Pistons teams. Tough defense, a great rebounder and defensive presence in general down low, and generally a bunch of good but no great players. Obviously there is a distinct best player on this Bulls team compared to the Pistons where pretty much everybody was equally valuable. The one piece that those Pistons teams had that this Bulls team doesn't have is a Rasheed Wallace type. I'm not suggesting the Bulls need to go out and get a 4 who can both drive and shoot, but it seems like they really need one more piece to really make it work. That was awesome seeing LeBron fail as hard as he did at the end of the night.

QUOTE (bobryansson @ Feb 24, 2011 -> 11:32 PM) They seem to be making Red Sox shirts smaller even than last years White Sox'. Seriously, Jenks is in really good shape, and those shirts just make him look terrible!

QUOTE (Paint it Black @ Feb 24, 2011 -> 09:55 PM) Get used to it around here. Back in some future sox threads I was nearly burned at the stake for pointing out people around baseball think Sale is a pen arm. Oh and you're out your damn fool mind if you wouldn't trade Sale for Rasmus. Sale isn't starting people. Not this year, not next. Yeah OK

QUOTE (LittleHurt05 @ Feb 24, 2011 -> 09:40 AM) I understand the whole WS drought thing, but the Cubs have made the playoffs 3 teams in the past 10 years, which is more than the other team in their market. They occasionally have real s***ty years but over the the past decade, they have spent the money and competed, nothing like KC/Baltimore. Of course, over the past 11 years, both teams have made it 3 times, and the team that has made it only 2 times in the past 10 years has a World Series title in that time frame too. I do agree that the comparison to KC and Baltimore is wrong though.

(from the relationship thread, really didn't fit there) QUOTE (RockRaines @ Feb 24, 2011 -> 02:59 PM) Thanks Wite, good luck. Being single is great, you do whatever you want to do, all the time. Work on yourself and everything will be great. The best thing about this is your workout program will probably be stellar. Oh the workout program is f***ing awesome. Just started week 6 of 12 of our program today, and there have been tremendous increases physically as well as visually already. I'm just ridiculously exhausted after every workout but I always feel great right afterwards. And I can tell that my fat percentage is down by a ton too because where I used to have a double chin (for a 5'10 150 pound guy), it's now only one and a half chins. After this, we are going to do with P90X or the Spartacus Workout for a while, not sure which. We did decide that we are atleast going to do the Ab Ripper X workout on our offday, which is usually Wednesday. We normally go in still, but our workout is very minimal, just hitting areas that we don't really workout otherwise - calves, back extensions, and hip adduction and abductions. So instead of that, we are just taking those 4 and adding one to each of the other days and we'll hit abs hard on Wednesday, while also doing some other type of minor ab exercise on Monday and Friday. Seriously, I never realized how awesome working out is. Maybe not the working out itself, because that can be a bit of a b****, but you just physically feel so much better.

In the past 4 seasons, here's what Dave Duncan has done with some relatively s***ty pitchers Jeff Suppan 2010 - 3.84 ERA, 70.1 IP (his ERA was 7.84 with Milwaukee) Jake Westbrook 2010 - 3.48 ERA, 75 IP (ERA of 4.65 with Cleveland) Joel Pineiro 2007 & 2009 - 3.96 ERA, 63.2 IP (5.03 with Boston), 3.49 ERA in 214 IP (did have a 5.15 ERA in 08, so it's not all good) Braden Looper 2008 - 4.16 ERA (4.94 ERA in 07 in his first full year of starting) Todd Wellemeyer 2007 & 2008 - 3.11 ERA in 63.2 IP, 3.71 ERA in 191.2 IP (career 5.20 ERA before that) Kyle Lohse 2008 - 3.78 ERA (career 4.82 ERA before that) They've also gotten three seasons out of Chris Carpenter where he finished in the top 3 in the Cy Young balloting, including one year where he won it. He had an ERA of 4.83 with Toronto. He also missed virtually 2 full years in 2007 and 2008...they were bad in 07, but won 86 games (and finished 4th) in 2008. I'm not suggesting that they are suddenly going to be able to replace Wainwright with some scrapheap pitcher, but this doesn't kill them yet.

QUOTE (JoeCoolMan24 @ Feb 24, 2011 -> 01:13 PM) Sale won't even be a reliable starting pitcher in the majors until around 2014 anyway, IF he ever gets the training wheels off to become a starter anyway. EDIT: Just realized you may be referring to the Buehrle-Rasmus trade, not Sale-Rasmus trade. Using this logic, Stephen Strasburg will also not be a reliable starting pitcher until 2014 at the earliest, and Aroldis Chapman is screwed. CJ Wilson will not be a reliable starting pitcher last year because he had pitched in the bullpen the year before (yes, I know the verbs disagree, it's intentional). You CANNOT say that Chris Sale won't be effective. Saying that is wrong. Saying Sale WILL be effective is WRONG. Saying "Chris Sale will join the rotation next year because the White Sox have two expiring contracts in the rotation as well as another starting pitcher who has one year left on his deal and is almost assured of testing the free agent market, and, hopefully, he (Sale) performs well" is CORRECT.

QUOTE (JoeCoolMan24 @ Feb 24, 2011 -> 11:55 AM) I dunno, I'd take a stud CF over a stud reliever any day. Well of course everybody would, but it wasn't Thornton for Rasmus, it was Sale for Rasmus. Instead, it's a stud reliever who could very easily be a stud starter next year for a stud CF. Oh, and you get the pitcher for like 2 more years than the CF. I'm keeping Sale.

QUOTE (Kalapse @ Feb 24, 2011 -> 02:36 PM) Creepy pic from Garfien: http://s3.amazonaws.com/twitpic/photos/ful...j6N75KN1X91Q%3D It's cruel and whatever else to make fun of how much someone lifts, but I curl as much as Juan Pierre. That's pretty neat. That is a pretty magnificent dumbbell set.

Thanks guys. I genuinely do want to move out to Seattle - it's not as if it's small enough that I'd run into her everyday - but my main priority is a good graduate school in a large city. There are hundreds of those, so really it's whichever University accepts me. I'm not really looking to date anybody right now, but perhaps someone comes into my life. That'd be cool, but it's "whatever" at this point. The main 3 things I am concerned with right now are keeping on my workout regimen, getting a job, and getting applications out to grad schools (which first involves taking and studying for the GMAT). I will see her in early May at USD's graduation - probably going to be one of the last times I ever go back - but I won't go out of my way to see her; it's a small enough town that meeting up at some point is inevitable. And if she were to want me back at any point during the next 2-3 months, I'd have to say no, atleast initially. There are too many issues of trust that we would have to deal with first for me to even consider something like that. I feel like I am ready to move on. I mainly just wanted to fill you guys in since I hadn't in a while.

So I'm officially single. Long story short, girlfriend moved out to Seattle at the beginning of the semester, kind of soured on me throughout the semester (it was my fault...I was nodding off in class and not showing the work ethic I needed to), came to visit in December and said she wanted to be single for a while. Upon graduation, we talked some more and we were still fine...just seemed like we needed some space. She registered on okcupid.com (because she wanted to meet more people in the Seattle area...right, OK) and eventually met up with someone on there. About a week after that, she called me and basically professed how she did have an undying love for me and that she would have married me and had kids with me had I showed her a little more - which I have since changed quite a bit, as the real world has delivered me a swift kick in the groin thus far - and she obviously continued hanging out with this guy. Well hanging out turned into "seeing each other" and contact between us grew a little more infrequent, but there still seemed to be signs that she was still interested (a random "I love you," continuing with pet names...she even told me she called the other guy my name when they were kissing for the first time). Just got off the phone with her, and she said that they were together, and this comes just after we exchanged Christmas gifts, in which I got her a book (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People), a photo book of the Bismarck area (with fitting captions), and a very nice necklace. She actually said that they've been together for a little while now, so she got it while she was dating him. I've actually been expecting it for a while, but the waiting was by far the hardest part and there is actually some relief knowing that it's finally official. I'm obviously not over it yet, but I think that will happen in time and a lot of the healing took place when I found out. I do still want to be with her, and I still do actually want to move out to the Seattle area, hopefully to attend graduate school at U of Washington, but in the meantime, I have to start living life assuming it won't be with her. It sucks, but so does life.

QUOTE (bucket-of-suck @ Feb 24, 2011 -> 12:38 AM) Aren't there months of offseason days in that 573 days figure...? How many in-season days (considering every 5th day) does that really represent? I mean I know the guy has been injured, but... He's been a member of the White Sox organization since July 31st 2009. A pitcher averages about 5.33 starts a month, so Peavy would have made roughly 11 starts in 2009 and 32 starts in 2010. Instead, he made 3 and 17, so he's made 20 of 43 starts. That is not a good percentage. The bottom line is that he needs to stay healthy this year. Hopefully the work ethic and the big talk come to fruition and he wins a Cy Young. That'd be all right.

QUOTE (Pale Sox @ Feb 23, 2011 -> 10:50 PM) I don't think Sale can be traded yet. He cannot.

QUOTE (JoeCoolMan24 @ Feb 23, 2011 -> 07:11 PM) I can't figure out if you are agreeing or disagreeing with me. I'm not really doing either, merely adding to the discussion. There are some players who perform better in the NL - guys who are dead fastball hitters, like Pat Burrell, and pitchers who can throw junk, like Carlos Silva - but generally, if you are a good hitter/pitcher, you will be good in both leagues. Adam Dunn is most certainly not an NL Hitter. I also think a DH should basically be considered an AL player, meaning that they can only start in the AL due to the DH rather than hit in the AL because they can't in the NL. Jim Thome can only get significant ABs in the AL right now because playing him on defense is simply not good for him, but I'm not about to call him an AL hitter.

QUOTE (Rowand44 @ Feb 23, 2011 -> 04:50 PM) D'angelo was one of my least favorite guys to ever play for the Sox. I could not stand that asshole. This may sound weird considering all that Williams has done in the past decade, but I don't recall the organization ever turning on a player so quickly. It was like he was viewed as the 2B of the future in the summer of 2002 to being completely gone in June of the next year. I don't think anybody was sad to see him go.

QUOTE (chw42 @ Feb 23, 2011 -> 05:56 PM) He sticks out on just about every team. Courtney Lee is inactive for Houston's game, could mean something. Not sure it means anything is imminent, it could just be that he's being shopped pretty heavily and they don't want him suiting up in case something goes down.

QUOTE (RockRaines @ Feb 23, 2011 -> 04:52 PM) Just reporting the facts. Guy has a baby's arm down there. Well he's a 7 foot tall black guy. I think that pretty much goes without saying.

s***, I still play Tecmo Super Bowl from time to time. Bo Jackson, Christian Okoye, and Thurman Thomas are monsters.

QUOTE (JoeCoolMan24 @ Feb 23, 2011 -> 04:53 PM) WTF is an NL Only hitter? I mean, I can understand an AL Only hitter because he needs to DH and can't play defense (Jim Thome), but NL Only? WTF? I've always associated the NL with fastballs and the AL with breaking balls, but it's not as if that's all you get in either league. Regardless of whether that is right or wrong, Dunn can hit pretty much any pitch. His pitch values per 100 seen (2010, then career) wFB/C - 2.10, 1.75 wSL/C - -0.01, -0.30 (he's had success at different points too) wCT/C - -2.32, 0.44 wCB/C - 0.19, -0.06 wCH/C - -1.39, 0.79 wSF/C - 1.83, 0.13 wKN/C - 2.19, 4.25 He's always been able to hit fastballs, but he has made significant improvements (save 2008) hitting sliders and split-fingers. He has struggled a bit more with the changeup in recent years, but he's generally done fine against it. It would also appear that he does just enough against the curveball that you can't continuously throw it to him. All things considered, Dunn is a great hitter. He's going to do just fine this year.

QUOTE (Jordan4life @ Feb 23, 2011 -> 04:37 PM) Damnit, I wish I could remember who it was that said Dunn was an "NL only hitter" when the signing went down? http://www.soxtalk.com/forums/index.php?s=...t&p=2292563

QUOTE (Milkman delivers @ Feb 23, 2011 -> 01:59 PM) He's not producing any offense for my team, so I won't give a s***. If he won't accept a trade that will get him off of a non-contending team so that he can contend this year and help out his current team with prospects, he'll just come off as even more selfish to me. After he convinced the Cardinals to spend a ridiculous amount of money on Holliday in order to persuade him to remain in St. Louis and then asked for the largest contract in the history of baseball, I've already soured on him quite a bit. I can't blame him for that though. The Cardinals are the ones to blame for giving Holliday that huge contract - it seemed as though they were bidding against themselves at the end. And he's the best hitter we've seen in a really long time, so I can't blame him for wanting one of the biggest contracts ever. Perhaps they'll find some middle ground and they can work out some type of 8 year deal with vesting and/or mutual options. I genuinely hope that they do.

FWIW, here is Dave Cameron's take on it. It's interesting and I think I tend to agree. Would I take Pujols plus some scrub for Rios and Dunn? For the duration of their contracts, absolutely I would. I wouldn't want Pujols for 4-6 years beyond that though, and that's the predicament that some team will almost certainly have to face 5 years down the road.